courhousedemolition

HOW WE LOST THE COURTHOUSE

Ask baby boomers who grew up in Santa Rosa what they miss from downtown: Chances are many will name the courthouse. Now climb into a time machine. Go back to the years those boomers were born and ask anyone working downtown what they wouldn’t miss if it were gone: Chances are most would name the courthouse.

In the mid-1950s downtown Santa Rosa was bustling, but not in a particularly healthy way. The population had grown by about 150 percent over the previous ten years1 and more people meant more businesses. But since this was also the Sonoma county seat, those retail stores or professional services were competing with city, county and state offices. Making matters worse, any available space was extremely tight because the downtown core still had the same footprint as the original tiny 1853 village as discussed in the intro to this series, “Yesterday is Just Around the Corner.”

As a result, government offices were mainly scattered between Third and Fifth streets with addresses subject to change. The county probation office was above the Topaz Room (Santa Rosa’s premier cocktail lounge) until it was moved to the Rosenberg building; you paid the water bill at the City Hall Annex before the Water Dept. was shuffled a block away to Third st. and the Annex – a small, one story building which was originally a gas station – became the Police Identification Bureau. Got all that? And this was just a small sample of the ongoing game of municipal musical chairs; when you see photos from that era with lots of people downtown, assume that a goodly portion are simply wandering about trying to find where the hell they’ve moved Parks & Rec.

But even before the population boom made matters so much worse, the courthouse was bursting at the seams from all the county offices housed in there. In 1945 they considered adding a third floor “penthouse on stilts” to the existing building, with most of the expense going to reinforce the structure. The solution settled upon in 1954 was to build a new county center (the present location) and migrate all administrative offices out there starting in 1956.2 By the year 1970, downtown Santa Rosa would only have the county jail and the courthouse which would still house the County Clerk, Tax Collector, and other offices that dealt with the public over a counter.

And then came the 1957 earthquake.

The March 22 quake was magnitude 5.5, which was the worst seen here since 1906. People were rattled but no one was injured and no buildings fell. The only damages reported at the courthouse initially were some fine paint cracks in one section of the building.

Then someone noticed the quake had “jiggled the overhanging cornice blocks a little farther out from the building,” according to the Press Democrat (They really meant the corbels underneath the cornice) and a contractor was hired to do a preliminary inspection.

County administrator Neal D. Smith told the PD the situation appeared “a lot worse than we thought,” and the contractor was afraid to touch them because it “might start a chain reaction” causing a hail of heavy, hard blocks, Smith added.

Smith continued by saying he was worried about the entire exterior veneer of the building, according to the paper. “We don’t know, frankly, what we’re getting into.”

Structural engineers from San Francisco were brought in and their report dropped the Supervisor’s jaws. Estimated cost of repairs was up to $452k – equivalent to over $4 million today. They found the corbels – which were only ornamental – were hollow and made of terra cotta so they weren’t very heavy, but they were attached to the building using tie wires, which were now badly rusted and wedged into holes held by wooden pegs that had rotted. Also, the 10-foot high concrete parapet wall above the cornice was generally in “poor condition,” was “apparently of low strength when built” and at risk of falling from its own weight as well as earthquake and high wind. Beyond that, they said further study was needed to see if the concrete in the building itself was similarly low grade and to see how well the pretty terra cotta cladding was attached to the concrete beneath.

Sonoma County Courthouse in 1957, before the corbels were removed. Photo Sonoma County Library
Sonoma County Courthouse in 1957, before the corbels were removed. Photo Sonoma County Library

Objectively it wasn’t really a terrible report, other than the decorative corbels had to be fixed or taken off. The big price tag was for stripping off all the terra cotta, bracing the underlying concrete and putting on modern ceramic cladding. If the county chose to simply do repairs the bill would be much smaller, as shown by the Supervisors approving an emergency $25,000 contract to have the corbels removed.

But that report was the camel’s nose; from that point onwards, the sad – and supposedly dangerous – condition of the courthouse became a recurring item on the Supervisor’s agenda and a running theme in the Press Democrat. The newspaper hyped the discovery of a ceiling crack in the Coroner’s office by noting it was directly below the “massive safe” in the treasurer’s office and new bracing was required because of the “questionably strong floors.” (Finalist in the competition for worst PD headline ever: “Engineers Find Many Bad Faults”.)

It’s important to understand the mindset of those times. The earthquake had left the town unnerved and learning that the courthouse may be in structurally “poor condition” was not reassuring to all those who worked there or just needed to do business there. Second: The new County Administration Center was still nearly a year away from having even the first building ready; should the courthouse be condemned as unsafe, there was no place to relocate all those many county employees.

Further complicating matters was another big issue which the Board of Supervisors was simultaneously grappling in the spring and summer of 1957: The creation of the county’s first set of uniform building codes. In one part of a meeting the discussion might be the politically hot potato of whether the new standards should be applied to older buildings that were being altered in some way – a scenario which would very much fit the courthouse. Later in the same meeting they might be wringing hands over the latest developments in the courthouse situation, particularly how far they should go with repairs. Petaluma’s Leigh Shoemaker was the first to say explicitly that it should be demolished, but all of the Supervisors joined in spitballing “what-if” scenarios about what should be done with Courthouse Square sans courthouse.3 Here was the first mention of splitting it in half with a roadway connecting Santa Rosa and Mendocino avenues.

More engineers were called in. This company drilled core samples and found the average strength of the concrete was around two-thirds of the minimum required in 1957 standards (the PD again pushed a negative angle, calling this “very low”). They also found that the huge slabs of terra cotta cladding were secured to the building in the same funky manner as the corbels – rusty tie wires held in place by dowels hammered into holes in the concrete wall. They reported there was a gap between 2-8 inches behind the terra cotta, but it was not explained whether that appeared to be caused by new slippage or how it was constructed.

Even the subpar concrete and discovery of the wall gap was not (yet) a death sentence for the courthouse. County administrator Smith told the Supes that for as little as $50k the terra cotta could be anchored to the back wall with the space between filled with an adhesive grout.4

And all was not bad news – addressing the earthquake safety risk, the final engineering report said the courthouse “is capable of withstanding only relatively minor earthquake shocks,” but cryptically added that like many similar buildings in the state, it “will no doubt remain in use for many years to come.” No, the building wasn’t up to modern building codes, but based on the average concrete strength found in the core samples it “just about” met the state’s standards for public buildings.

The year 1957 ended with the Board of Supervisors indecisive, agreeing only that the Fourth street scaffolding should be left standing and places where the terra cotta had been removed by the engineers should protected with plastic sheets until the end of the rainy season. It was expected that all of the cladding would come off the following year and the building would be covered in plaster.

Sonoma County Courthouse in 1958, with all the terra cotta cladding removed. Photo Sonoma County Library
Sonoma County Courthouse in 1958, with all the terra cotta cladding removed. Photo Sonoma County Library

Had all of this played out a year or two or three earlier, I have little doubt that the courthouse would have been repaired and preserved – that was, after all, the most economic route. At the start of 1958, four out of the five Supervisors agreed. But that was the year Santa Rosa caught a serious case of redevelopment fever and the Supes were not immune. Plus, they had a new prestigious consultant.

The recommendations from Ernst & Ernst were more radical than expected. Their experts guesstimated it would cost over one million dollars to rehabilitate the building; better to abandon it ASAP and sell Courthouse Square. (Hugh Codding had already made an offer of $350k – I’m sure Gentle Reader was waiting for him to pop up somewhere in this story about development, just as Alfred Hitchcock always made a cameo appearance in all of his movies.)

All hope of saving the courthouse was now dead, even though there was no clear path forward. The rest of the cladding was removed along with the parapet wall. The building was waterproofed and the scaffolding removed, leaving the once-beautiful building stripped down to its unlovely concrete bones.

Little happened for more than a year, but it was still desired to keep the courthouse near downtown. Santa Rosa’s newly formed Urban Renewal Agency (URA) had enormous powers to declare parts of the town “blighted” and had hired New Jersey architects to come up with an urban redesign that incorporated the courthouse and jail. A drawing of this plan can be found in the recent article about Santa Rosa Creek because the courthouse/jail were to be built on the south side of the waterway.

But the Supervisors – who had agreed to delay a decision for six months to give the URA a chance to present that plan – voted unanimously (with one abstention) to rebuild at the new County Administration Center instead. Now all they had to do was raise $3+ million to pay for it. The county put a bond measure on the ballot in 1960 and it was voted down. In 1961 they tried again and it was voted down. In 1962 it was voted down. Twice. In 1963 it was voted down. Methinks a pattern was beginning to emerge.

Meanwhile, it came to the attention of the State Division of Industrial Safety that people were still working and being held behind bars in those buildings, even though the county was no longer making improvements or doing needed maintenance. An investigation began just days before the first of the 1962 bond votes. The safety department’s report gave the county two months to submit an detailed schedule for making repairs or to evacuate both the jail and the courthouse. The Supervisors instead raised the county’s liability insurance by a million bucks.

The standoff intensified, with the state issuing still more fixit orders and the county appealing for delays until the next bond vote. Some of the repair demands were fairly trivial – move filing cabinets further apart so the weight wasn’t concentrated in one place – but others would have involved extensive work, such as rewiring parts of the courthouse so electrical office equipment would be grounded. The state had the Santa Rosa Fire Department do an inspection and the Fire Marshal found the courthouse to be an “extreme hazard.”

After the bond failed for the fifth time in 1963 the county finally gave up trying, and that summer a non-profit corporation was formed to provide funding (much to the ire of anti-tax activists).5 The Industrial Safety office stopped saber rattling.

Sonoma County Courthouse c. 1963. Photo Sonoma County Library
Sonoma County Courthouse c. 1963. Photo Sonoma County Library

And so we come to 1966 and the end of our tale, with the judges and clericals and supervisors all nestled snugly into their new digs at county central. It was time to knock down the courthouse.

There’s a story I’ve heard ever since I came to Sonoma county. Maybe you’ve come across it too; supposedly that old courthouse – which was supposed to fall down at the slightest earthquake – turned out to be so sturdy the company hired to demolish it went bankrupt trying to do the job. Welp, that story’s true. Sort of.

1908courthouseconstruction(LEFT: The courthouse under construction in 1908. Image courtesy Sonoma County Library)

A company called Bay Cities Excavators was hired and given 75 days to finish the job. Around day 18 the PD interviewed the wrecking-ball crane operator. “There’s a little more steel than I thought, but it doesn’t create too much of a problem,” adding that the courthouse would be down by the end of the following week. Had any of the workers bothered to look at the photos of the building when it was under construction they would have known there were tons and tons of steel inside that crumbly concrete – if anything, the structure had been overbuilt for strength.

courthouse1966A week passes. Another month passes. Eight days from the deadline, the job still isn’t finished and the company has stopped work, claiming to have encountered a “sizable underground structure” which was unanticipated. (I’m guessing it was the old cesspool from the previous courthouse, a topic mentioned here earlier.) After the county whacked them on the nose with the rolled-up contract they continued work “under protest” and threatened to sue. Bay Cities Excavators likely lost money on the job but they didn’t go bankrupt and did several more projects in Santa Rosa over the following years.

The same day demolition began, there was a ceremony where the county sold Courthouse Square to the city of Santa Rosa and its URA. That moment was long the fevered dream of developers; very soon half of it would be up for sale.

NEXT: IT WILL BE A RESPLENDENT CITY


1 Santa Rosa population 1946: 14.9k (within city) 39.4k (metropolitan area). Santa Rosa population 1957: 32.5k (within city) 56.8k (metropolitan area). Source: Polk city directories

2 The Recorder’s office was the first to move out of the courthouse to the County Administration Center in April, 1958. Strangely, the original 1953 plan called for the County Library to be relocated there as well.

3 It was presumed in 1957 that Courthouse Square was county property, although the question of title would not be even addressed until 1963.

4 Smith later mentioned using gunite on the building, which would have worked well to fill the gap between the concrete wall and the terra cotta cladding.

5 Sonoma County Courthouse Inc. was founded to solicit about $5 million from private individuals to pay for the estimated $4.5 million cost of the building, which would be leased to the county for about $350k/mo for twenty years.
Image courtesy Larry Lepeere collection
Image courtesy Larry Lepeere collection

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under1963bridge

HOW WE LOST SANTA ROSA CREEK…

Pity future historians; they will struggle to understand why we destroyed the things we loved most – and even paid for the pleasure. When the 1960s began, Santa Rosa had a lovely creek burbling through its downtown. Before the decade ended, the town’s jewel became a flood control channel buried under a pile of reinforced concrete buildings which no one would ever call lovely.

In the history of many towns there’s a chapter with an unhappy and wrong-headed tale such as this, and it’s because the nation was gripped by a collective madness called “urban renewal” during that era. Anything new would be better than anything old simply because. There was also free federal money available as long as the magic words were spoken: “urban blight.” So cities across America declared large swathes of their communities were indeed filled with areas injurious to public welfare because of being unfit, unsafe, obsolete, deteriorating, underdeveloped (read: undertaxed), subject to flooding or otherwise terribly blighted. File your blight report and don’t forget to include the address where Washington can send the money.

(This is a continuation of of the series, “YESTERDAY IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER,” which examines how Santa Rosa – a city which has always had swaggering ambitions – only has limited options for betterment today because of terrible 20th century planning decisions. Part one showed the downtown core is cramped because we rejected proposals to revise its layout beyond the setting of the original 1853 village, and how highway 101 “sawed the town in half” against the advice of state engineers.)

Santa Rosa took its first redevelopment baby steps in 1958 when the City Council formed an Urban Renewal Agency (URA). Besides its five appointed members there was soon a full-time planner, an executive director hired from Merced and out-of-town consultants to study the issues (bet you didn’t see that twist coming). Come September 1960 they discovered that Santa Rosa was indeed blighted, and in the amount of forty acres.

Meanwhile, there was another federal gravy train pulling into the station loaded with even more money, this time for flood control. Normally the Army Corps of Engineers does this kind of work but Sonoma Water (AKA the Sonoma County Water Agency, AKA the Sonoma County Flood Control and Water Conservation District) wrestled away most of the project along with its $11.8M budget – the equivalent to about $106,000,000 today.

Both urban renewal and flood control projects kept a low profile over the next few years. Reports were written, best plans were laid. Surveyors surveyed. The most exciting related event was the design proposal by the city’s New Jersey consultants. A scale model of their reimagined downtown (“as modern and carefully engineered as the latest model of a star-probing rocket” – PD) circulated around several bank lobbies. Their 1960 layout is seen in the drawing below, with a county/city government center along both banks of a fully restored Santa Rosa Creek.

North looking view of 1960 Santa Rosa redesign by Candeub, Fleissig and Associates of Newark, NJ, with the courthouse/jail on the south side of Santa Rosa Creek.
North looking view of 1960 Santa Rosa redesign by Candeub, Fleissig and Associates of Newark, NJ, with the courthouse/jail on the south side of Santa Rosa Creek.

 

That they highlighted the creek was not surprising. Every prior re-envisioning of the town did the same, starting with plans for a waterpark in 1906 (which was followed by the quixotic attempt to turn it into Lake Santa Rosa). In 1945 there was local architect Cal Caulkins’ park at the junction of Matanzas and Santa Rosa Creeks to compliment his vision of a new civic center. While the URA and flood planning was underway Santa Rosa was also doing an update to its General Plan, and the Planning Commission wrote this in 1962: “It has been suggested that there is not enough emphasis upon the preservation of Santa Rosa Creek for public purposes, such as hiking, riding, and bicycling trails. The staff recommends that the general plan be changed to show a green belt throughout the whole length of the Santa Rosa Creek within the planning area.”

This shuffling rate of progress came to an abrupt end in early 1963, after the North Bay was slammed with the worst winter storm in eight years. Santa Rosa received over two inches of rain in 24 hours during Jan. 31-Feb. 1, and the Russian River flooded – according to the Russian River Historical Society, it ranked #11 among top floods. Suddenly big decisions had to made, and made fast.

In mid-February it was revealed $3.5 million of flood control funding would be lost unless work plans for the upcoming year were submitted by July 1. Unlike urban renewal money – which required little more than flashing a pretty smile in the general direction of Washington – the water money was controlled by a tightwad Congress limiting how much dribbled out each year and was awarded competitively from two different agencies.

Santa Rosa was in for a rude shock. Except for the Planning Commissioners having just recommended creek preservation as part of a greenbelt, nothing about the future of Santa Rosa Creek had been mentioned in the Press Democrat for years – undoubtedly everyone expected it to be a featured part of the beautification of the town promised as part of urban renewal, per the drawings and models by the consultants. Not so. A headline in the March 17 PD presented the grim options: “THE CHOICE ON SANTA ROSA CREEK: LINED DITCH OR CULVERT”.

It seemed that the flood experts had been planning since 1959 to use a concrete-lined culvert for the stretch of the creek running through downtown. Gentle Reader is forgiven for now muttering, “bait and switch.”

There were federal specifications connected with the project that required this, a consulting engineer explained. Otherwise, the banks of the creek would have to be gradually sloped back, which would “destroy access to and usefulness of many more acres,” according to the PD. Which, of course, was exactly what was shown in the drawings and models.

The only given alternative was to “bury the whole thing,” which URA officials “believe to be an even neater solution.” The article continued, “an artificial creek, somewhat like that in Juilliard Park, has been suggested as part of the landscaping.” A following edition of the paper illustrated the difference with a photo of an open culvert that had both banks protected by five-foot chainlink fences topped by barbed wire. Next to it was a pastoral image of Juilliard Park and its fake creek. Pick one.

A joint meeting was called with the City Council, Planning Commission, plus all their other little boards, commissions and agencies. The three side-by-side box culverts would be a total of 48 feet wide and 17 feet high, enough to handle the surge of a 100-year storm, the officials were told. Otherwise, if the creek overflowed “it would sweep through downtown.” But the consultant who said that was either ignorant or lying; during the megaflood of 1862 the Central Valley became a giant lake and Sacramento was under ten feet of water, yet here the overflow from Santa Rosa Creek barely reached Courthouse Square. It was hardly a calamity, but there was no one there to challenge his audacious claim.

So without further consideration they immediately approved the underground culvert plan, with the original creek bed to be filled in “for use as a landscaped pedestrian way, and an artificial creek as part of the landscaping.” The city would end up paying for a good chunk of that work, however, as flood control only covered the cost of it being an open channel. Thus the URA coughed up $311K to condemn to oblivion the only natural feature everyone wanted to preserve.

Putting a bright shine on the loss of something so precious, the URA Executive Director insisted they not only would save money on not having to build bridges, but the city now had additional land for development. And that raised a big new question: What should they build on top of it?

NEXT: …AND HOW WE GAINED AN UGLY CITY HALL

Water levels at the A Street bridge during the 1963 flood. Top: Under an unspecified creek bridge during the 1963 flood, probably one of last pictures of Santa Rosa Creek before it was entombed. (Photo: Sonoma County Library)
Water levels at the A Street bridge during the 1963 flood. Top: Under an unspecified creek bridge during the 1963 flood, probably one of last pictures of Santa Rosa Creek before it was entombed. (Photo: Sonoma County Library)

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ed1958

ED MANNION HAS SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

It seems everyone who knew Ed Mannion has a story about him – which is perfectly fine, as he had lots of stories of his own to tell. About a century’s worth, in fact.

Until he died in 1991, Mannion was Petaluma’s unofficial historian and best known for his weekly “Rear-View Mirror” column in the Argus-Courier, although it ran less than four years and didn’t even appear all weeks. He filed his last column the day President Kennedy was killed; why he stopped wasn’t explained.

But Ed Mannion left behind more of a footprint than just “Mirror” (as he called it). He was writing about local history years before the column and years after; he assembled an enormous collection of rare documents and photographs which became the foundation of the library’s Petaluma History Room. And if Ed the Historian isn’t enough to impress, take note he was also a key participant in the uphill fight against PG&E’s scheme to build a nuclear reactor at Bodega Head.

In the golden age of newspapering in the 1950s and 60s, his was likely a household name all over Sonoma county. In the golden age of the Internet today, his name is unknown. Google currently returns a measly 300-odd hits on him – mostly credits given in books for use of photos now in the library collection. Ed’s own voice is nowhere to be found online without access to a paid newspaper archive service (note: available on Sonoma county library computers). I never met Ed, sorry to say; even more, I regret never reading any of his stuff before this summer. To me, his name was just a nod in one of those footnotes.

What follows isn’t a biography of Ed or a critical review of his legacy – it’s  just an appreciation and an introduction for 21st century readers. I’m only covering “Mirror” up through the end of 1961, which was the halfway point of its run. There is plenty left over for another article or three, including the story of how Ed and his co-conspirators were dumpster-diving (literally!) to rescue original historic photos which were then deemed worthless.

So for just a moment, pretend it’s 1954 and you’ve just strolled in to “Nick’s Chat & Chew” for lunch (the building’s even still there, at 600 Petaluma Blvd S.) and at the end of the counter is this funny-looking goofball telling stories. He’s snaggletoothed, his hair appears to have a mind of its own and his oversized black-rim glasses look like a failed effort to pull off a Clark Kent impersonation. But everybody around him is laughing – so let’s eavesdrop for a bit.

Gag photo of the Argus-Courier back room staff shooting craps in 1955, with Ed Mannion drinking from a bottle. Photo courtesy Sonoma County Library

 

 

“Yoiks! Another Columnist Enters the Ring” read the headline introducing Ed Mannion to Argus-Courier subscribers on Saturday, Feb. 6, 1954.

“News pickings sometimes tend to be a little slim for the week’s caboose edition, and the city editor has declared it Amateur Day instead of wasting good boiler plate. Or maybe, because I’m a linotype operation, he figures on saving copy paper by having this composed at the machine.”

Ed was indeed a linotype operator for the paper and would remain so for another thirty years, as well as a proud member of the Typographical Union. For those unfamiliar, these were the machines used to setup “hot lead” type via use of a bizarre keyboard. Anyone who was around such a shop (as I was as a child) will tell you the linotype operators were usually some of the most well-informed and erudite people you would ever meet – after all, they had to carefully read every line of the newspaper every day.

The Argus-Courier was a perfect home for Ed; it was a lively small town paper with a stable of must-read columnists including Lura Frati, Bob Wells and Bill Soberanes. By contrast, the Press Democrat at the time was a slog to get through, with pretensions that it was a major metropolitan daily and crammed to the margins with indifferent wire service items (least compelling headline ever: “Senate Debates Wool Bill”).

That incarnation of Ed’s column only lasted for a few issues but he remained familiar to readers through guest columns and mentions by the other writers. One story concerned the birthday of a friend who was an avid fisherman. Ed gave him a large rock with a note attached: “It is plain to see that you have been using the wrong fishing technique.” Also included was a clip from an 1879 paper, where it was reported that steelhead were so plentiful in Petaluma Creek that people were catching them by dropping rocks in the water.

Ed also contributed feature stories on the last ferry between Oakland and San Francisco (service resumed only after the 1989 quake) and the last ferry between San Rafael and Richmond. At home he had a small handpress he used to print up Christmas cards and the like, so for the final trip from San Rafael he handed out cards to fellow passengers: “This is to certify that the bearer is a member of the Anti-Bridge and Prevention of Cruelty fo Ferry Boats Society.” On the back was a vow “…to continue the fight against progress wherever it rears its ugly head.”

His fondness for gags like the rock and the cards (and a few more described below) can make it hard to take him seriously as a historian. Or was he just a “history buff”/collector? Did he want to educate readers by explaining how the pieces of history’s puzzle came together to form a picture – or was he just a guy who liked telling some really good stories?

Mannion called himself “a tramp printer who likes to read old newspapers,” which earns him my respect, revealing he tapped primary sources for information rather than repeating hand-me-down stories. He wrote so much there are probably mistakes which I don’t know enough to spot, but so far I’ve only found one glaring error – and to his credit, he found it himself some years later and corrected it.

It’s true he rarely tried to synthesize what he knew in the way “big H” historians do, but there’s not much room for that sort of thing in newspaper columns of only 600-1,200 words. His only real shot at long-form writing came with the historical portion of the 1955 centennial edition of Argus-Courier, which was edited and mostly written by him and his wife, Chris.

That section of the A-C is over 75 pages long (ignoring the full page ads) and is quite a remarkable work. Ed makes it clear at the beginning that they wanted to make something of interest to the casual reader but also good enough for serious historical research. “The fact remains that the usual way for newspapers to put out an anniversary issue is to use what passes for historical material as window dressing while the main emphasis is on jazzy promotion.” Amen to that, and let’s hope the Press Democrat resists the temptation to turn its sesquicentennial edition over to the Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Bureau.

In short, the August 17, 1955 edition of the Argus-Courier is permanently bookmarked in my browser; I’m certain I’ll keep returning to it as long as I’m writing about local history, as it covers the entire southern portion of Sonoma county. But Ed was still Ed, and there’s a bit of good natured humor in his intro to the section, which is framed as a “letter to mom.” They didn’t have room for everything, he explained, but they always tried to get area names right – even Valley Vista grammar school, which he thought “sounds like a title coined by a housing tract sub-divider’s wife who writes poetry.” Putting it all together was rugged, he wrote, but “I’ll come right out with the puppy-dog hope that a couple of readers will write in to say they liked our efforts.”

Enough credit cannot be given to Chris Mannion for her involvement with that task as well Ed’s other history projects. Besides having six pre-teen children (eventually, seven), she was sometimes his library researcher, cataloger of his archives and bric-a-brac, phone secretary and often accompanied him on interviews (while Ed was starstruck meeting Ida Lupino, she was somewhat less speechless in chatting up husband Howard Duff, showing off pictures of their kids). She was a part-time photographer for the paper and had a side business selling its photo reprints. In 1960 it was her, not Ed, who led the fight to save downtown Hill Plaza Park from being bulldozed for parking spaces. She died in 1971 at age 47.

After the paper’s centennial came Petaluma’s civic 100th birthday in 1958, and that was absolutely the best year for Ed Mannion’s adventures, which were tied in with E Clampus Vitus and fellow buff of history, Ed Fratini. This other Ed was the grounded yin to Mannion’s wilder yang. While Ed F. was diplomatically inviting San Francisco’s mayor to attend the Petaluma festivities, Ed M. was advertising in a San Francisco newspaper for a live, fighting grizzly bear.

Ed Mannion in costume at a celebration during the late 1970s. The woman with her face turned away is his daughter, Mary. Photo: Sonoma County Library

 

 

“Grizzly Bear wanted for bull and bear fight Main Street Petaluma, reply to the judge. McNeil Drive, Petaluma”, read the ad in a San Francisco paper a month before Petaluma centennial celebration in April, 1958.

“The judge” was Ed Mannion’s costumed Clamper persona; members of “The Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus” dress up to celebrate historic events. They also mount commemorative plaques and drink. They drink a lot.

As mentioned earlier, 1958 was also the 99th birthday for the Washoe House and the Clampers mounted a plaque at the famous roadhouse. That night they were up to their usual hijinks, including trying to push an old fire engine into the lobby of the Hotel Petaluma (it got wedged in the doorway and remained there for days). The events ended with a group dinner at the hotel – “a whole chicken for each man, and served on pitchforks,” as was promised.

Ed Mannion vowed to recreate an arena fight between a bull and grizzly bear that actually happened in 1861 at Haystack Landing. According to the Argus, the bear tried to escape and charged the ladies’ section of the bleachers. (“Ah, the good, pure days of yore,” Ed commented in a later “Mirror” column.)

The wire services picked up a photo of Ed wearing a sandwich sign promoting the “Bull and Bear Fight” on the back (the front showed a chicken pecking at a dancing Clamper) and interests were aroused. It made the front page of the paper in Virginia City and was widely blurbed in Bay Area papers. An incensed  animal lover from Redwood City threatened to organize a statewide boycott of Petaluma. Ed finally wrote a disclaimer revealing it would really be just a couple of guys in costumes – but it’s not clear if the Clamper from Rough and Ready knew it would be a mock battle when he promised his pet badger, Solomon, would take on the winner.

Thus with costumes custom-made for the occasion, Smokey the Bear fought Ferdinand the Bull at Walnut Park in front of an appreciative crowd. In the third round the bull charged and the costume’s head fell off, after which the bear was declared the winner on account of decapitation.

The year 1958 was also when the Petaluma Fire Department sold its old ambulance. The two Eds came up with the $100 (or so) to buy it, with the view that a 1935 antique would be a “fine thing for parades and so on.” Its first outing was to a Clamper dinner at Beale Air Force Base near Marysville, where they arrived with wailing siren and flashing lights. Enroute they were pulled over only once, which is somewhat surprising because they were dressed in their pioneer getups and a cop doesn’t see an ambulance driven by ersatz 49ers every day.

Afterwards, one of the Clampers asked them for a lift into Marysville. Ed and Ed obliged, but when they arrived their passenger refused to leave unless they carried him into his favorite tavern on a stretcher.

“This was done,” wrote Bob Wells, “and it developed that the rider had many friends in the bar. All these had to be formally introduced.”

Finally on their way back to Petaluma through Napa county, the headlights  began to fail. Mannion discovered he could jiggle wires under the dashboard to temporarily get them to flicker back on, but when they flickered off again he had a flashlight at the ready to shine through the windshield and keep Fratini from running them into a ditch.

And so we come to the debut of Rear-View Mirror on March 12, 1960.

While Ed Mannion could write in a concise news style as the subject demanded, most of his offerings are a happy and entertaining tour of whatever had his attention at the moment. Some columns read like a modern blog, as Ed digs through his cluttered desk in the den at their home at 1 Keller street, crowded with the seven kids, two cats and a dog named Scooter.

Reading “Mirror” is like touring Burbank’s garden – there’s lots to see and absorb. With hopes that Gentle Reader is not too weary of reading about all things Ed, here’s a bouquet of items from the first two years that are little-known (at least, to me) and quite interesting:

 

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During the Civil War, Schluckebier’s store listed prices in both Union and Confederate money
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A letter about Petaluma schools in the 1870s recalled Professor Crowell’s tenure ended when he was gassed out by a prankster putting red pepper on a hot stove. Another teacher was attacked with a heavy inkwell (“thrown at his head by a degenerate son of an honorable townsman”) and still another was stabbed in the arm. The school on the corner of Fifth and D was the only place where “white and colored pupils were received and treated as equals.” [A history of the Petaluma schools found in the centennial edition of the A-C states it was originally all African-American and integrated later in the decade]
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Ed complained often Vallejo’s Old Adobe was never a fort or ever called Casa Grande – until he discovered a man named Bliss bought the place in 1859 and indeed renamed it “Casa Grande.” Oooops!
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“Petaluma looks toward the future, not to the past, and forthwith carted off a great deal of valuable local memorabilia to the city dumps,” Ed griped about the Chamber of Commerce. Several times he complained the city itself had carted away a 5-foot bronze statue of a nude Greek goddess which once was perched atop the fountain at the corner of Washington and Main
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Petaluma made Santa Rosa furious by setting steamboat schedules so “up-country” travelers had to stay overnight at a local hotel
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Someone gave Ed the last surviving copies of very short-lived newspaper called “The Weekly Amateur,” put out by Petaluma youths around 1887. While it mostly reflected their interests in baseball, doings of the volunteer fire department and entertainment, there was also this vignette: “Some Petaluma youths do not seem to appreciate our gas lamps by the way they are perforating them with sling shot missiles. Any way, what a great satisfaction it is to a boy to see a light of glass crackle to pieces by his proud marksmanship. If the proprietor or cop gives chase, he is all the more delighted”
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Petaluma inventor Jacob Price Jr. might have been considered the Edison of farm equipment c. 1860-1880, designing steam tractors, seed sowing machines and the famous “Petaluma Press,” which could bale 3,600 pounds of hay an hour
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His mention of Luther Burbank brought a response from Edgar Waite, the reporter whose controversial interview in 1926 revealed that the much-respected Burbank considered himself an “infidel” and that Christianity had “garbled” Jesus’s teachings. An uproar followed, but it’s never been clear if this caused him stress that led to his heart attack a couple of months later, followed by his death at 77 years. Waite – who personally knew Burbank from his time as a Press Democrat reporter – wrote to Mannion, “I went up to see my friend again, and to make sure that he felt no regrets. He didn’t. On the contrary, he expressed himself as happy that his views had been spread on the record, and bemoaned only the mountain of correspondence that had descended upon him”

 

 

Chris and Ed Mannion, undated photo. Courtesy Petaluma Museum

 

 

May 13, 1961 Argus-Courier caption “…Ed’s arm is around Ida Lupino. He says he’ll never wash it again. She suggested both face the camera but he replied, “I’m looking in the right direction!” Photo: Sonoma County Library

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